Kiss Me First (23 page)

Annie asked me about that final night. I explained how difficult it was to stockpile the morphine, because the nurses kept a strict eye on it, so I had devised a plan. The nurses had given us a laminated sheet of emoticons, from smiling to miserable, which they called a pain scale. When they arrived in the morning and asked how she had been during the night, I told them that she had indicated she was at the highest level of discomfort on the pain scale, even when she hadn’t. They then prescribed an appropriate amount of morphine that would go straight into the drip attached to her arm. Later, when they left, I would unscrew the drip and skim a small amount of morphine off the top, and put it in a bottle in the fridge. The bottle was from a head-lice treatment that I had bought from the chemist and washed out, and I told Penny that I had a persistent lice problem, so she wouldn’t go near the bottle – a bonus was that she also kept her distance from me.

I kept on skimming off the morphine until I had a fair amount. Then, on a Saturday night – that was important, because the nurses didn’t come in on Sundays – I administered the extra morphine slowly, over the course of twenty-four hours. Mum went into a coma and died. On the Monday morning, I waited for the nurses to come in and they rang the doctor. The death certificate cited the cause of death as complications arising from MS.

Which, I added to Annie, wasn’t strictly untrue. Annie asked whether mum had explicitly asked me to give her the morphine.

‘No,’ I said. ‘By then, she couldn’t speak.’

‘Had she mentioned euthanasia in the past?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘We didn’t talk about things like that.’

‘So how do you know it’s what she wanted?’

I replied that I just knew. I could tell from the look in her eyes.

Annie nodded slowly, her face still and grave, and then gave my arm a squeeze.

‘I’d best get back.’

She zipped the tent door back up and got to her feet, and I listened to the sound of her footsteps and the clunk of the van door as she slid it shut.

I don’t want to give the impression that I was neglecting Tess because of my frequent communication with Connor. That wasn’t the case at all. It’s true, however, that it didn’t take much work to keep her life running smoothly. After the initial flurry of activity upon arrival in Sointula, she had settled into the new apartment and her job teaching Natalie. Her small group of acquaintances had been established. With practice, writing and reacting as Tess had become much easier and now I barely had to think before pressing ‘send’ on messages. The bulk of my work consisted of responding to news about her friends’ lives on Facebook.

Most people, it seemed, were self-centred – even with someone as popular as Tess, it was a case of ‘out of sight, out of mind’. After a few weeks, even her closest friends had stopped showing an interest in her life – genuine interest, I mean, rather than a token ‘How’s it going?’ tacked onto an essay of volunteered information about themselves. When I posted the first photo of Tess in Sointula on Facebook, it received sixty-seven ‘likes’; one I posted a month later got a paltry two.

I felt slightly aggrieved that so much of my careful preparation was going to waste – clearly, no one was going to ask why the Finns chose to settle in Sointula, or what Natalie had drawn that day, or what mark Tess had received in her GCSE history (a B). It did, however, make my job easier, and allowed me to devote more time to Connor.

For me, something had changed after the incident in the sandwich shop. I started to think about him in a different way. And it was not long afterwards – five or six days – when he wrote something that made me think that his feelings had also shifted up a gear.

First, I should explain that we had been emailing about
The Princess Bride
. Connor had asked what books I had liked as a child, because his daughter Maya was starting to learn to read and he was wondering what to buy her. I mentioned
The Princess Bride
, omitting the fact that it still was my favourite book. The next day, at the end of an otherwise innocuous email about a gig he had been to the previous evening, he wrote:

Hey, and remember – kiss me first.

Kiss me first
.
The phrase meant nothing to me, and it was nowhere in Tess’s emails and files. Google told me that it was the name of an Italian film about lovers who were separated and spent their lives yearning for each other. The film was released in 2003, around the same time that Connor and Tess were seeing each other, which made it a plausible origin for the phrase.

But Connor had not capitalized the words, which I was sure he would have done if it were a reference to a title of a film. Like me, he was punctilious about such things.

The most likely option, then, was that it was a private joke, a reference to something that one of them had said to the other when they had been together. And, I thought, it couldn’t be a coincidence that he had introduced it so soon after our conversation about
The Princess Bride
and that it had the same number of words and syllables as the phrase, ‘As you wish.’

If you’re unfamiliar with
The Princess Bride
, ‘As you wish’ is what the hero, Westley, says to Princess Buttercup as code for ‘I love you.’

As you wish. Kiss me first. I love you.

I don’t normally jump to conclusions, but in this instance the inference seemed clear.

The next step was to consider how I felt about this development. That didn’t take long: the fact that Connor loved me made me feel very happy, and my instinct was to respond in kind.

However, I suspected it was irrational, if not impossible, to be ‘in love’ with someone you’d never actually met. I did some research, cross-referencing various def-initions of the emotion with my feelings for Connor, and was pleased to discover the existence of what was described as a sort of ‘pre-love’ state, called limerance:

A cognitive and emotional state of being attached to or even obsessed with another person, typically experienced involuntarily and characterized by a strong desire for reciprocation of one’s feelings.

This description tallied with my feelings, and I concluded that I was in limerance with Connor.

I decided that the best course of action – what Tess would have done – was to not acknowledge the declaration immediately. So, Connor and I continued emailing as normal, and it was not until four days later, at the end of an email describing that day’s painting session with Natalie, that I signed off in kind:

kiss me first xxx

His reply:

! xxx

In his next message, he abbreviated the phrase to
k.m.f.
I followed suit, and from then on we both signed off all our emails like that, our own private code
. K.m.f
.

So, it was official. I began to apply myself to being in limerance. One of the symptoms I found was a desire to associate myself with the things he liked, to feel closer to him in lieu of his actual presence. Although his emails had already provided me with a certain amount of information on his tastes and interests – I was by that point eating three packets of cheese and onion crisps a day, and had read up on snowboarding and photog-raphy, his two principal hobbies – I was greedy for more. I instigated a whimsical email game in which we both compared our likes and dislikes of ten years ago, when we last saw each other, to now, in order to show how we’d changed. I was rather proud of this idea, since not only would it provide information on him, but also give me an opportunity to establish how Tess had changed since he had last seen her. How she was, in effect, a different person.

Connor sent me his lists first, along with explanatory notes.

2002 –

Film:
Scarface

Book:
Mr Nice
(yes, I know. I’m being honest, OK?)

Music: Eminem

2011 –

Film:
Lost in Translation

Book:
The Master and Margarita
(it took me eight years to get round to reading it but you were right, it’s amazing).

Music: the XX

My turn. Selection for the ‘old’ Tess of 2002 was easy: I had lists of relevant information compiled from our conversations and receipts for her purchases.

Film:
Three Colours Blue

Book:
Norwegian Wood
by Haruki Murakami

Music: Bach’s Six Suites for Unaccompanied Cello

For the ‘new’ Tess of 2011, I decided, after some deliberation, on a combination of her tastes, mine – and Connor’s.

Film:
Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring

Book:
Anna Karenina

Music: the XX (snap!)

That night, I downloaded the album of our new favourite band, the XX, and listened to it three times over. As far as music went, it was quite nice. I also got
Scarface
and
Lost in Translation
and watched them both.
Scarface
was awful, horribly violent, and I was glad it was no longer Connor’s favourite film.
Lost in Translation
was better, although nothing really happened and I didn’t really understand the point of it. But it was, as far as I could see, about two people who liked each other, which was pleasing. Also in the interests of understanding Connor better, the following afternoon I spent some time in the toiletry aisle at Tesco sniffing the different aftershaves in an attempt to identify the lemony one I smelt on him in the sandwich shop. Eventually a man told me off for opening the packages, but I found one that smelt quite similar, bought it and put it on my wrist every day.

We continued writing to each other. One of the things that surprised me was how easy it all was. At school, the girls were always talking about ‘the rules’, what to say and how to act to get a boy to like you. ‘Don’t call back. Don’t be too keen.’ But with Connor everything that I said seemed to be the right thing, and seemed to make him like me more.

Then, two weeks after Connor’s initial
kiss me first
, something happened that temporarily diverted my attention from him.

I had, by that point, left three messages on Marion’s answerphone – all the variations on ‘Sorry to miss you, I’m doing fine’ that Tess and I had recorded. After the last, she had sent an email.

Darling, you know I have book group on Wednesday, do try to call at some other time. I keep trying your mobile but it’s always off. Have you got your landline installed yet? We really must speak.

I felt both annoyed and vindicated. I had, after all, voiced my suspicions to both Tess and Adrian that Marion would not be satisfied with just answer-machine messages and would require greater contact. I didn’t, however, feel panicked, as I might have done had this happened in the early stages of the project. It seemed like a minor hiccup, rather than a disaster, and one that could be resolved with ingenuity.

I listened again to one of the taped conversations with Tess, to see if it was feasible for me to amend my voice to pass as hers. It was not. My voice was much higher, my accent not so ‘posh’, and I discovered I was not a natural mimic: in fact, my attempts were laughable. Even when I spoke very quietly, to replicate the effects of Marion’s deafness, and added the crackling sound effects of a bad long-distance line, I did not think it would pass.

Listening to the recordings of our late-night conversations put me into an unexpectedly sad and pensive mood, and it was a while before I could re-focus on the matter in hand. It then occurred to me that there might be a way of using the recordings. After all, I had hours of Tess’s speech recorded, all the raw material one could need, and it was possible there was software that enabled one to form new sentences from individual words and sounds.

Some investigation on Google revealed that such a thing did indeed exist: a voice-changing program with a virtual audio device. The process involved importing Tess’s voice into the program, recording my own voice, and then comparing the two, making adjustments using the equalizer and noise reduction. When the two were comparable, my words would be translated into Tess’s when I spoke via the computer’s microphone.

This was an exciting development, and I put everything else aside for the afternoon. After downloading a pirate copy of the software I imported several hours of Tess’s speech, which was quite a fiddly job. Then I did a practice run, slowly reading out the nearest thing I had to hand – a takeaway menu leaflet from the restaurant downstairs – and recording the results onto the Dictaphone. It was not a success. The occasional simple word – ‘rice’, ‘naan’, ‘prawn’ – was passable, but the vast majority did not sound like Tess, and the whole thing had a tinny, electronic quality that could not be explained by a long-distance phone line.

Over the following hours I repeated the process over and over again, adjusting the equalizers to find the right combination of pitch, intonation and timbre. With each recording, I added some lines I thought would be likely to crop up in my phone conversation with Marion: ‘Succulent lamb in a thick, creamy, spicy sauce. Yeah, mum, it was the best decision I ever made. Chicken cooked in butter and topped with almonds. How is dad getting on with the new carer? That’s amazing your necklace was featured in
Harper’s Bazaar
.’

Eventually, I had something I thought might sound vaguely convincing as Tess, but by that point it was hard to be objective, and it seemed best to test out the imitation before using it on Marion. First, to make sure I didn’t sound like myself, I phoned Rashida. She and I had not spoken for some time, but she was still the person who knew me best, after mum. I dialled her mobile, having first taken the precaution of shielding my number, and hoped she hadn’t changed it since we last spoke. Sure enough, she answered.